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Event

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative

Date & Time

Monday
May. 13, 2024
4:00pm – 5:30pm ET

Location

Online Only
Zoom Webinar

Overview

This session is sponsored by the American Historical Association.

Long considered among the twentieth century’s most influential economists, Milton Friedman was also an innovative policy thinker and a major ideological figurehead whose vision—for reduced government, expanded markets, and the twinned forces of capitalism and freedom—circled the globe and reshaped American politics.  In this first full biography based on archival sources, Burns explores his complicated relationships with high-profile figures like Fed Chair Arthur Burns while also illuminating his frequently overlooked collaborations with women like Anna Schwartz and his wife Rose Director Friedman, who were pivotal to his success.

Jennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. A graduate of Harvard College, she is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009), which was also the subject of her doctoral dissertation in history at UC Berkeley.  Professor Burns been a guest on both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, and has published articles on conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Die Ziet, Quartz, and numerous academic journals. 

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.

Speaker

Jennifer Burns

Jennifer Burns

Associate Professor of History, Stanford University

Panelists

Bruce Caldwell

Bruce Caldwell

Research Professor of Economics, Duke University
Debora Spar

Debora Spar

Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; and Senior Associate Dean for Global Business and Society

Hosted By

History and Public Policy Program

The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs.  Read more

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